0:00:00 Ben Wright: I’ve been trying and, you know, I’ve been tested.
0:00:06 B: Welcome to the Friends in Business podcast with your hosts, Ben Wright and Jemimah Ashley. Ben, known as the sales strategist, and Jemimah, our resident visibility expert, are here to share their wealth of knowledge and experience with a little fun along the way. Whether you’re a leader, entrepreneur, or aspiring business owner, this is the podcast where we share everything we know about business to help you succeed.
0:00:31 B: Let’s get started. Welcome to the Friends in Business podcast.
0:00:44 Ben Wright: Hi, Jemimah. Welcome back to Friends in Business.
0:00:46 Jemimah Ashleigh: Ben, pleasure as always. Thousand-degree day again in Noosa. What’s up with the humidity here? You’re gonna hate it.
0:00:54 Ben Wright: You’re gonna hate it. It’s actually cooled down quite a lot. This is the end of Heath, period.
0:00:58 Jemimah Ashleigh: Right.
0:00:59 Ben Wright: I mean, as you’re listening, right, we’re into autumn now. No. This is beautiful.
0:01:02 Jemimah Ashleigh: Okay.
0:01:03 Ben Wright: This is why you live in paradise.
0:01:04 Jemimah Ashleigh: I think I’m gonna visit Dragon Tile. Honestly, that’s amazing.
0:01:09 Ben Wright: That’s amazing. We get the fire going or actually, I’m all. This year, it’s all going to be about chocolate chip marshmallows. I didn’t even know they existed until we were in the States.
0:01:17 Jemimah Ashleigh: I’m sorry, can you say that again?
0:01:18 Ben Wright: Yeah, marshmallows with chocolate chips in them. That is what we’re going to be.
0:01:23 Jemimah Ashleigh: That’s the podcast guys. We will run an ad at the end of this for Amazon to go.
0:01:27 Ben Wright: When we were over there, I learned about that. I learned about s’mores.
0:01:30 Jemimah Ashleigh: S’mores are amazing. I’ve had those. I used to live in the States. Sorry, I’ve done L.A..
0:01:34 Ben Wright: Is that right?
0:01:34 Jemimah Ashleigh: Louisiana. Austin, Texas and Washington state.
0:01:37 Ben Wright: Yeah. Wow.
0:01:38 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. I was in Canada for a year as well, so, yeah, North America and I have got a good relationship.
0:01:42 Ben Wright: We hit up L.A.. San Fran, Phoenix.
0:01:47 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, Phoenix.
0:01:47 Ben Wright: Denver
0:01:49 Jemimah Ashleigh: I love San Fran. San Fran’s like Melbourne, right?
0:01:52 Ben Wright: San Fran, Yeah. I always have to say San Fran and LA are my two. The two cities I’ve been to in the U.S. right. So I could probably live there.
0:01:58 Jemimah Ashleigh: Oh, yeah.
0:01:59 Ben Wright: They’re the only two so far.
0:02:01 Jemimah Ashleigh: Really?
0:02:02 Ben Wright: Yeah. Where I think I could live now. That’s it. I haven’t been that far.
0:02:04 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. Okay. New York was always my, like, secondary home. That was a place I could definitely go and live for a couple of years.
0:02:11 Ben Wright: Yeah. There’s something pretty cool about New York. Getting my first slab of pie from a corner pizza shop. Oh, that was. I’ll never forget that.
0:02:19 Jemimah Ashleigh: The pizza. It’s a piece of zar. What did you say? Pizza, pie.
0:02:23 Ben Wright: Slab of pie.
0:02:25 Jemimah Ashleigh: A piece of zar.
0:02:27 Ben Wright: Slab of pie. All right, you know what? We probably need to go back to New York.
0:02:31 Jemimah Ashleigh: All right, guys, guys, Road trip. Love it. Okay. Have you been to Texas?
0:02:36 Ben Wright: No.
0:02:36 Jemimah Ashleigh: I feel like you would be a Texas guy. I lived in Austin for a while and I loved it.
0:02:40 Ben Wright: Yeah, I do enjoy it. Going to the States a lot. I came back plus 4 kilos. But also I was amazed when I went this time around through Sam Fran. The number of companies advertising AI call coaching or similar, it has exploded. So if you’re a business out there and you haven’t started to look at AI and we’ve got a great guest, actually, that we’re looking to bring on who has a terrific AI call coach and sales agent business. But yeah, it’s here. He’s here and as a leader and if you’re not across it yet, whether it be sales or any other parts of business. Yeah, time. Certainly time to do so.
0:03:12 Jemimah Ashleigh: I think AI is one of those interesting things as well, right. That there are so many people backing against it. Have you seen this? People like, avoid AI, you just get, you know. No, no. I think you have to learn to work with it. I think you have to understand that we are actually where we are. And therefore you’re going to have to make sure that you are moving with the times.
0:03:33 Ben Wright: That’s it. As with any mass technology adoption that has happened over the last number of years, the Internet, mobile phones. Right. Smart devices
0:03:40 Jemimah Ashleigh: CD players will never catch on.
0:03:43 Ben Wright: I mean, those that didn’t jump aboard did get left behind.
0:03:46 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:03:47 Ben Wright: And we’ve seen businesses die. Right. Businesses that are no longer here because they didn’t move quickly enough for the times. I think Blockbuster is often a great case study right around what happened there
0:03:57 Jemimah Ashleigh: Understanding how to pivot. Netflix was originally like, you dialed a disc and a DVD arrived at your house like it was a movie was delivered to you in the mailbox and suddenly it was now being streamed and now it’s being. You can be streamed on your phone and now it can be watched on your phone with no Internet access. As I got through the flight yesterday to come up and see you with downloaded Netflix shows.
0:04:20 Ben Wright: Well, you’re going to end up with gaps in your offering.
0:04:22 Jemimah Ashleigh: Absolutely.
0:04:23 Ben Wright: If you’re not following, and that’s actually what we’re here to talk about today is gaps within the business. It’s going to be short and punchy. I think this is three in a row that we’ve led with me as the subject matter person.
0:04:32 Jemimah Ashleigh: But I feel like we’re on the roll with that. And I think while we do usually pass that back and forth, I think because we have. There is such a strong correlation between the last couple of episodes, I really wanted to continue that. That was really important to me.
0:04:45 Ben Wright: Yeah. Yeah, great. And thank you for letting me do that. And thank you everyone for listening, particularly the pieces we just went through around a good sales process, episode 31 and 32, that is as good as it gets in terms of my knowledge. So I’d highly recommend you jump in there.
0:04:59 Jemimah Ashleigh: It’s like you get to sit and pick your brain on that.
0:05:01 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:05:02 Jemimah Ashleigh: And hopefully asked enough questions so everyone goes. That’s what he means by that.
0:05:06 Ben Wright: Well, yeah, absolutely. People can always get in touch with this if they’re not sure.
So let’s talk about business gaps. For me, I talk a lot about building out processes. Right. Over the last six or eight weeks, we’ve spoken about building out sales processes. We’ve spoken about how you can make the most out of awards season, which comes through building out processes to answer awards. We’ve spoken around the 10 things that you are an expert in, which is a process to write down all the key pieces of information that people should know about you.
0:05:35 Jemimah Ashleigh: It also builds out other processes. It builds out your blogs and your social media. And you know, I think what people don’t realize probably about us enough is how much our lives are system based. This is what we do, this is how we do it. This is why we do it. But also why we have successful businesses at the back end is because we have these things already built. Like it’s not accidental.
0:05:56 Ben Wright: Yeah, without doubt. Right. And for those ones we’ve just mentioned, if episode 28 that was all about making the most out of award season, episode 29 was all about the 10 things to what you’re an expert in. Then we moved into sales processes through the early 30s. Right. We’re now into starting to talk about.
Okay, so you’re building all these processes out in your business, but how do you take those processes to make your business the next version of itself? Right. To ascend it from where you are now to where you want to be. A couple of things I want to talk through here. Number one is to first work out where you want to get to. Right. And for me, that’s about creating the 12 month version of yourself. So in 12 months time, where do you picture your business being?
0:06:34 Jemimah Ashleigh: I love this because one of the things I often say, like where are we trying to get to? It’s obviously a conversation we have with our clients all the time. Oh, you want to be better well known. What does that actually look like? What’s the benchmark we could have, and I love likening this to like, you. And I get a plane. So we get the plane, we go down to the Maroochydore airport, we jump on and you know, your wife’s bought the snacks, we’ve given your kid the blankets, we’ve jumped on the plane, we get in there with the pilot, we’re like, let’s go. And you turn to me, we take off, we’re soaring at 10,000ft and you look at me and go, where are we going? And I’m like, I thought you knew. And how often we’re in these situations without us realizing we’re in this situation. We just went through the motions. Oh, we’ve got the plane, we should go, where are we going? And eventually, if we don’t figure that out, we’re going to burn out, planes going to crash, we’re going to get tired, we’re going to yell at each other, we’ve got a problem. But if you just said to me, hey, listen, we’re flying to Sydney, I’m in.
0:07:33 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah. So it’s all about actually working out where you want to go.
0:07:37 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:07:38 Ben Wright: And then taking those steps to get to that journey. So for me, when we’re trying to find gaps in our process. Right. We can use that aeroplane example perfectly. Right. Okay. We need to be.
0:07:47 Jemimah Ashleigh: Surprisingly, one of my analogies has worked.
0:07:51 Ben Wright: You have plenty of analogies that we like. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Right. And I’m not even going to qualify that. So we are working out where we want to be in 12 months. Right. Step number one. So by doing so, we’re actually writing down all the key things about our future self or our future business. Right. So. So when we’re looking at that, and for example, if we’re a business that is in the healthcare space and in 12 months time, we need to have sales growth of 30%. Right. Let’s say we’re in a rapid growth phase. Right. What we then can need to step back into is to say, okay, so to hit that rapid growth phase, how many more customers do we need to get?
0:08:26 Jemimah Ashleigh: Right.
0:08:26 Ben Wright: We step that back and to get those customers, how many do we need to meet? Right. Or how big is our pipeline? Sorry. And then how many do we need to meet? Right. And what we can then do is step back from those goals and actually see where the gaps are. Well, actually hang on, we want to be growing by 30%, which is the equivalent of 150 new customers. We know that those customers generally we’re going to be closing one in three from when we quote. So we need to be getting out to 450. And of everyone that we meet, we quote 1 in 2. So then we need to be actually having our first prospects. Our first meet and greet needs to be with 900. So we got 900 across a 12 month period. Right. That’s 75 customers a month that we need to be getting to. I think my maths is correct on the fly. Right. And we’re currently only getting to 45.
0:09:09 Jemimah Ashleigh: As soon as you start saying numbers. I trust you so sufficiently I just hear while you’re explaining it. So I’m like, Ben knows math.
0:09:16 Ben Wright: We’re good. Yeah. As the parrot’s talking, right. If we sit here and say, well, we’re only at 45 customers right now, but we need to get to 75, we’ve got a gap of 30.
0:09:24 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:09:24 Ben Wright: Right. Which is essentially six, seven, eight customers a week. Right. Six, seven, eight, depending on how you look at it. Right. If it’s a linear week across your month. Right. We can straightaway go, right, there’s our gap. Let’s get to fixing it.
0:09:35 Jemimah Ashleigh: Right.
0:09:35 Ben Wright: So that is a really effective way of saying, okay, to get to where we want to be. Right.
0:09:40 Jemimah Ashleigh: What does this look like?
0:09:41 Ben Wright: What does it look like? And then we work backwards to see what’s missing.
0:09:44 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, I love it.
0:09:45 Ben Wright: We can do that in marketing. When it comes down to leads we have to generate, we can do it in operations. When it talks about throughput jobs per day. Right. We can do it in legal. Right. When we’re spending X amount of time dealing with certain issues at a legal level or at finance, when we have a certain amount of bad debtors. Right. Or cash flow, whatever it may be, how much, how many jobs we need to step back towards to get our cash flow right. Supply, payment terms and so forth. So when we set where we want to be, we can then look at where the gaps are and step backwards from there.
0:10:13 Jemimah Ashleigh: I love this. The one thing I just want to say, like, not to disagree with you, but a little bit of a qualifier here. I think one of the things that I’ve seen that prevents people from even taking this step is cause 30 seems like so much. Like I’ve got a gap of 30 people, I’m never gonna be able to find. Da, da, da. Like we do have this. It’s almost like an automatic break we’re like, oh, no, I can’t do that. Cause I’m gonna. It seems like a huge gap. I would just say carefully going forward. Like, even if for 12 months you’re like, I need, you know, 30 people. That’s gonna be two a month. Even if you only get half that, you’re still 15 above where you were.
0:10:47 Ben Wright: Yeah. Shooting for the stars but landing in the trees.
0:10:50 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, we’re fine. Like, fine. You’ve done better that you’re off the ground. Yeah, yeah. And you can have another run at that. And these can be adjusted and these can be malleable dates and data and things that you’re putting in here. And things can change. And also, you know, you can change things to make this work.
0:11:07 Ben Wright: No doubt. You’re better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. Right. This is really impactful here that if you’re out there trying to grow your business and you don’t get there. Yeah, it’s not so bad. Everyone’s kissed plenty of frogs, I think, as the saying goes. Right.
0:11:22 Jemimah Ashleigh: I can’t wait to see you bring this back, but let’s go.
0:11:25 Ben Wright: It’s very real, Right. If you haven’t thrown that love into growth your business and tried and giving it everything you can. Right. Then at the end of the day, you are unlikely to get to where you want to be.
0:11:35 Jemimah Ashleigh: Oh, for sure.
0:11:36 Ben Wright: Unlikely to have that business that gets all the results you want.
0:11:38 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. Great.
0:11:39 Ben Wright: That’s the first option in terms of finding and solving gaps in your business.
0:11:43 Jemimah Ashleigh: Love that.
0:11:43 Ben Wright: That second piece, which I think is a really effective way as well, is generally going to come off the back of when you’ve process mapped a lot of your business. So we’ve just spoken about mapping out your sales process, which I think is an integral part of what you do. Right. For me, where the gap analysis can become really cool is when you go through that sales process, right? Those five steps, lead generation, meet and greet, quote, closing, and then your post sale onboarding and key account management. Right. When you go through those five steps and everything you’ve set up is find the gaps, find the things that you’re not doing really well.
For example, when it comes to the meet and greet, if you are not confirming your meeting as a salesperson, great. There’s a gap, Right. We can roll that through the team that there’s reminders in your CRM to be filling. Sorry to be confirming those meetings.
0:12:33 Jemimah Ashleigh: And you’ll only go to someone’s house one or two times and realize you’ve Waste hours of your life before you’ll course correct that and be like, I better get that confirmation in.
0:12:42 Ben Wright: Yeah. But I mean, you’d be amazed though at how quickly you then start to forget to confirm your meetings again. Right. So we, we build that process gap into our CRM. Have you confirmed the meeting? Right. If you’re missing in the meet and greet piece around needs analysis, right. You’re not spending enough time doing that or your teams are generally jumping too quickly. Right. From rapport building into needs analysis, you can start to train your teams on this, you can start to systemize it, but by having processes written down, it gives you the opportunity to find out where your gaps are. And for me, that is actually as effective as saying, here’s where we want to be in 12 months time. Right. Versus here’s where we are now. Let’s fix some of these gaps and that’ll help us on that journey. So those two ways really practical in terms of identifying gaps, what I love that comes from there is how you fix them.
0:13:30 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:13:32 Ben Wright: And it’s easy to say, we got the gaps, let’s go to it. But there’s, there’s a systematic way that works here. Two thirds of all change management activities fail. Right. Big.
0:13:43 Jemimah Ashleigh: That’s big. Two thirds fail.
0:13:46 Ben Wright: Two thirds of change management activities fail. If you even think about it at a personal level, how many times have you said you’re going to go and build a new habit and you just haven’t got there?
0:13:55 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, it’s true. I mean us probably not so much. You and I have got pretty established habits down because of the businesses we have. It’s actually lack of other choice, I think, more than anything. But for most people, isn’t it something like 14 days, like New Year’s resolutions are done by about the 15th of January?
0:14:11 Ben Wright: Oh, I don’t, I haven’t subscribed much into that, which is. I believe it, but I’d say I’m human as well. One of the things that I have at the moment is as part of my, you know, my life outside of business is trying to get super fit and healthy back into triathlons, is I know that I’m eating my meals in the wrong balances at the wrong time of day. Right. And I’ve set myself a goal that I’m going to start adjusting. Going to be adding a little bit less carbs at night, more front loading around when I’m exercising. But she’s. I’m finding it hard to build the habit.
0:14:37 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:14:37 Ben Wright: Really bloody hard.
0:14:38 Jemimah Ashleigh: So we did order Fries to the table last night.
0:14:41 Ben Wright: So we did. We were with the chippy’s sitting out over the water. It’s very hard to beat.
So what I will say, though, is when we identify where we have the gaps within our business, making that meaningful change for me is most successful. And we can look at. We’ve spoken about atomic habits before. We can look at all types of different models here. But where I see change most effectively impacted is when we get the team involved.
0:15:03 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:15:03 Ben Wright: So we have the goal, but we then bring the team together to work out the solution. Right? The why. So the solution becomes, right, we’ve got a gap in our meet and greet part of our sales process, or we have a gap in our marketing lead generation. Here’s the impact it can have on our business if we get it right. Right? So we get the meet and greet. Right, we start to close 25% of our customers. We’re closing 35% of our customers. Right. And all of a sudden that gap, to use the example from the start of the podcast, is that we need 30 new customers a month extra. That starts to close because we’re actually simply closing more. So actually don’t need the 30 new customers. Right. We might only need 15 or 10 more because we’re closing more of what we got. Right. So that’s the why that comes in. And then we sit down as a team and we say, okay, here’s how we’re going to make this happen.
0:15:50 Jemimah Ashleigh: One of the things, I’m just going to go back to my plane analogy because somehow I know more about planes than I do about this process. Ben. But I did once meet a pilot who explained to me the difference between taking off from Sydney and arriving in Japan and arriving in LA is one degree, but it’s one degree over hours and kilometers. So it was not much of a change. But the difference between, you know, one degree here is that versus we’ve now got this really significant departure from where you can end up. Wow.
0:16:28 Ben Wright: One degree difference, right?
0:16:29 Jemimah Ashleigh: One degree.
0:16:30 Ben Wright: You pitch one degree difference when you’re in Japan.
0:16:32 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. And I use analogy a lot in atomic habits because it is just like you change one thing, you can actually change everything. And that old, you know, idiom about, oh, you’re only one decision away from a totally different life. And it’s true, but it’s a stack of decisions that you have to make. And I really love that idea of just these tiny little. And like you said, you close one gap, you start to close another. You suddenly, just during one degree activity You’ve gone from Japan to LA pretty quickly.
0:16:58 Ben Wright: Yeah. And this is where the power is in bringing your team together. When you bring them together, decide how you’re going to fill those gaps. We get everyone on the same page because that 1 degree gap also works not only from an improvement point of view, but also within your team. If everyone’s just slightly misaligned, Right. And you start trying to move towards that common goal, that goal becomes very, very wide. And all those pots of gold you want to pick up along the journey, they become very, very different. Right.
So, yeah, hugely impactful. As you work out the gaps, bring your team together to solve out how you’re going to pick those gaps. And then the third part here is setting deadlines. I talk about the three Ds, deliverables, decision makers and deadlines. This piece here is around due dates. Right. And then measuring progress to them. How are we going? We’ve got a team that’s, that’s regularly looking around this improvement piece in your business. You’re catching up. How are we going against our goals? Are we there? What’s getting in the way?
0:17:53 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:17:53 Ben Wright: Stopping it happening. And what are we going to do next? Right. And I talk a lot about change management champions. I think it’s another discussion for another day. Right. But the piece that’s really important here is we’re setting the goals, we’re working out how to build them together, and then we’re measuring progress. Because when we measure progress, we can see when things are working and when they’re not.
0:18:11 Jemimah Ashleigh: What is measured is managed.
0:18:13 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Another one of what gets measured gets done. Right?
0:18:16 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:18:16 Ben Wright: There’s so many sayings around this.
0:18:18 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. Well, it’s just a reminder. I love the reminders because, like, whatever you’re measuring, you’re managing. It’s like if you. Where you’re ignoring it, it’s chaos. But if you can bring it in. You know, we love a good system in this podcast, but again, it’s got to be managed.
0:18:30 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah, yes. And so I think the practical impact here for people listening is if you’re a smaller business.
0:18:35 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:18:36 Ben Wright: Right. Work out where you want to be or work out where your processes will build your processes within your business. Find those gaps, bring the most important people who would fix those gaps together.
0:18:46 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:18:46 Ben Wright: Set the progress or set the task and the action items and then measure those. If you get that right. Be it a small business or a larger business, you’re on your way to filling gaps and growing.
0:18:56 Jemimah Ashleigh: So tell me one takeaway. What’s Your one takeaway for today, the.
0:19:00 Ben Wright: Bit that I’m never going to forget is 1 degree difference between Japan and LA when taken from Sydney. But I think actually that’s a really important takeaway, is if we make small changes really regularly, they can have a tangible impact on where we land. I really like that. From today.
0:19:16 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, great. My takeaway would just be how many plain metaphors I apparently have and knowledge. I will say the gap is really interesting and I do like this idea. I was like, I really liked. What did you say? Land. Aim for the moon and land on the. Land in the trees.
0:19:31 Ben Wright: Shoot for the stars.
0:19:32 Jemimah Ashleigh: Land in the trees.
0:19:33 Ben Wright: You’re still higher than.
0:19:34 Jemimah Ashleigh: You’re still higher than when you were. And I was like, sometimes zero, like one is greater than zero. Right. Like we’ve always going to be that one thing.
0:19:39 Ben Wright: So, yeah, yeah, making progress is really important.
0:19:42 Jemimah Ashleigh: Excellent.
0:19:42 Ben Wright: Well, thank you, Jemimah. I have loved it today. Good, friendly chat, lovely friends in business. We look forward to seeing you again.
0:19:50 Jemimah Ashleigh: Thanks, guys.
